I love beer. The only thing better than having a cold beer in a summer day is maybe having many cold beers in a summer day. I’ve been trying to go to the World Beer Festival in Raleigh for a while now, but every year it conflicted with some business trip I had to take. With the economic slowdown and the fact I’m traveling less this year, I knew this would be the year I’ll have a chance to go the festival and experience all the beers offered there 
(you have to look at the half glass full…).
The Beer Fest offers hundreds of beers from over 120 national and international breweries. Tickets for the event were sold for $44 (they sold out 3 weeks before the event…). There are two “sessions”: 12pm-4pm and 6pm-10pm. Basically when you get in, they give you a map with all the different breweries available and a souvenir cup that you use for unlimited tastings of all beers, meaning everything you can drink before the 4 hour session ends or before you pass out 
. The cup you get is a little pint that the breweries fill with 2oz of their beer so you can try as many as you can and not just get drunk on one kind. You can of course get as much as you want from the same beer if you liked it.
I tried a lot of good beers that I never had before. At some point it was a little difficult to differentiate between them or remember which one I liked best 
. The one that did catch my eyes was a little brewery from San Francisco, CA called Shmaltz Brewing Co. I tried their Coney Island Lager and they have many other great beers that you can read about on their web site and check where you can get them. Check also their funny video clips.
